


Unquiet Like the Snow

by ficsation



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alaska, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Crait is not Coldfoot AK, Exes, F/M, Good Boy Sweater, Modern AU, Second Chances, There is No Moving On From This, ok maybe not quite sweater weather
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:41:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23586286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficsation/pseuds/ficsation
Summary: Crait, Alaska was supposed to be the last place he’d look for her because, if he knew her at all, it would be the last place she’d be.But here he is, by her diner door, shaking the snow off his good boy sweater.One day,he proposes. One day and one question, and then he will be gone. Rey figures she has nothing left to lose after today.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 10
Kudos: 33





	Unquiet Like the Snow

She imagines an ocean.

It is the sea that she misses the most. Where she comes from, there is nothing but dust fields and dry earth, but in the years that she always calls as _after him_ , she has grown intimate with the lullaby of the waves, the white crests in the distance, the tides undressing the rocky shore.

Now the only ocean she knows is the snow stretching in all directions across the frozen ground. Even the yawning river is still; Crait is merciless to water this time of the year. So she imagines movement, inundations. She imagines that somewhere south, the afternoon sun is spilling over the sea like a broken egg yolk.

She also imagines libraries and late night pelmeni quests and lazy Saturdays burrowed under the sheets _(and yes, water is not the only thing Crait has no mercy for)_.

Rey is surprised that she doesn’t miss the sun. She had not thought that possible, her first November here, when she had dragged her bags and broken heart into Maz’s diner and contemplated the Lifetime movie her life was turning out to be, ahead of the prospect of two months in polar night. But the haul road brings the weary truckers and quinoa-fed hikers day in and day out, and two months turns into three, into a season, into a year, and Rey keeps her head down because there are orders to take and tables to wipe and she can choose not to look up at the sky.

_(Sweetheart, I’m not going to die if I don’t take my vitamin D.)_

Outside, the twilight is filtered in grey. Folks who visit Crait seem to expect the desolation, something to write home about, and they come anyway, lured by the promise of northern lights along an empty highway. In lieu of a sunset, the clouds have smudged the snow-crusted mountains into the landscape, robbing the traveler of a focal point beyond the unforgiving prices of unleaded and diesel over the diner, the green and red numbers a beacon through a fringe of spruce. The slightest of winds forages through the lazy snowfall, rustling the flakes as they meander to the ground. The middle of nowhere looks achingly beautiful to Rey.

“Look lively, folks, we’ve got incoming!” Rose says brightly as a tour coach comes rolling into the parking lot. It is her first season here and her excitement is catching.

“They’re running late. They’re hungry. It’s snowing. Two minutes,” Finn, who has stuck his head out of the kitchen window, calls out.

“I see fellow Asians with selfie sticks,” Rose says firmly, as the passengers trickle down the bus. “This is a solid photo op. I’ll go with three. Rey?”

Rey gives a small laugh as she readies a few menus. Amusement come easier to her now. “Oh no, count me out.”

“What’s this?” Hera, one of their guests, asks curiously. She and her husband have been together for nineteen years, married for fourteen, but they still stumbled out of yesterday’s tour coach and into Crait arm-in-arm like newlyweds. They waste their spotty cell service on calling their kids, who grouse and grumble but are polite enough to say hi to their parents’ new friends. There is something about the Arctic Circle that makes people overshare. Rey envies them, just a little.

“Oh, we’ve got a running pool to see how long guests last in sub-zero temperatures before heading for the diner’s warm, if greasy, embrace. Loser puts in a quarter in the pot each time,” Rose says matter-of-factly, with a pointed look in Finn’s direction. Finn may have been here for two winter seasons now, but Rose’s seemingly accurate read on folks has put her slightly ahead.

Hera grins. “Did you bet on us yesterday? How long did you think we were going to be out there?”

“Definitely not seven minutes,” Maz pipes up from behind the cash register, all-seeing, all-knowing. While everyone else who works at the diner is seasonal, Maz is not. She has measured her life here in census visits. She is one of the reasons Rey has even heard of Crait.

Kanan nudges his forehead against Hera’s, hiding his face from view as he likely recalls why they were out there for so long. Everyone does. Rey finds his shyness endearing. Hera pats her husband’s cheek and attempts to change the subject. “You’re not betting, Rey?”

“Nah. She always bets less than a minute and just got tired of losing,” Maz cackles. “Rey is often wrong when it comes to things like this.”

Rey—she is finding out herself—is wrong about a lot of things.

But impossibly quicker than Finn’s two-minute prediction, the bells over the door announce a new diner. She fights the _I-told-you-so_ that quirks her upper lip. “Welcome to—” she begins on cue as a too-tall figure steps in.

The door swings against his broad shoulders, smacking against them with a padded thud as he lingers by the threshold to stomp the snow off his boots. His head is down, but Rey knows the winter coat he is shucking off, knows the heavy footfalls, the scarf around his neck, and any other kind of welcome dies on her lips.

“You could have won this time,” Rose stage-whispers.

But Rey doesn’t need anyone to tell her that; Rey is often right when it comes to all things Ben Solo.

She imagines seeing him much more often than she imagines the ocean, and in every iteration, she is different and he is different and their lifetimes fall from their lips. Sometimes there are tears. Sometimes he is penitent, sometimes indifferent, and more often than not they shatter against each other like every argument they’ve ever had. Sometimes they kiss, sometimes they are sweat and skin, and it is those what-ifs that Rey has a hard time breaking off. But all of those lifetimes are open-ended and unknowable, and they don’t often go the way she thinks.

Now here he is, by her diner door, shaking the snow off his good boy sweater and Rey chides herself for not imagining an ending hard enough.

His eyes meet hers. He blinks like he is the one unprepared for this contact.

“Ben Solo!” Maz thunders from her seat. “I don’t care if you’re coming or going but for heavens’ sake, son, your shoulder is not a door stopper. Don’t let all the heat out.”

“You know him?” Rey hears Rose ask in the background.

Maz ignores the question. “Go find Kaydel. Rey will swap shifts with her.”

“She will? Like right now? But Rey didn’t… And Kaydel’s…”

“Go!”

“Did you come with the tour bus?” is the question someone directs at Ben, and to her shock, she realizes that it comes from her mouth. This is how she knows that this is real and not just another one of her imaginings; she is less eloquent, she is less flippant, she is all hope in warm air, and she doesn’t know if she hates herself for it.

_(How can you be in my space like it’s nothing)_

But it’s not _nothing_ , she realizes, as she watches emotions announce themselves across his face without his consent: a blink of uncertainty, a breath of relief, and— _no, Rey, no, that’s not hope you see_. She blinks and now his dark eyes are a summer storm. Ben has never been good at hiding his emotions, and he defaults to the mild irritation that he reserves for strangers. Rey surmises that he can be just as easily irritated by her presence as he is by the long drive or the smell of pulled pork from the kitchen. Neither of them looks away. His wide mouth is chapped, deliberate. She wants to kiss it to feel how rough it would be against her lips.

But he does not look surprised to see her. This is no coincidence then. Instead of answering her question, he takes a step toward her, then stops himself.

Rey understands. They shouldn’t be doing this here, not in front of a middle-aged couple and a handful of truckers. Not in front of her new family. Or, as the door opens and the tour group jostles Ben aside, in front of tourists eager for a spectacle to rival the aurora. She casts about for the menus and belatedly realizes that she is already holding them when Maz snatches them away.

“You’re off the clock,” Maz snaps.

Does she think that she is doing Rey a kindness? The protest is quick to rise to her lips. “No, I can do it. We don’t have to—”

Maz interrupts, not unkindly. “Seriously, child, who are you kidding? Do you really think you can concentrate with him here?”

Rey resents the insinuation that she is vulnerable in his presence. Even back when they were still together, whether she had been working in the lab or studying in their apartment, she had always prided herself in her ability to focus on the task at hand. But all Maz remembers is the red-eyed girl who only left her room for late-night dinners, who went scurrying into the kitchen whenever Han dropped by during the first three months. Rey wants to yell belligerently that she is not weaker because of her ghosts, but she must concede that heartbreak is its own kind of devastation and Maz has not seen the worst parts of her life to understand the difference.

She decides to be prodded into this inevitable conversation, _you are here I am here we are at the end of the world_ , so she angles her face and her body towards Ben while deliberately avoiding his eyes. “Do you want a corner booth?” she asks softly. “I bunk with one of the other girls; I don’t think we’d get better privacy than this.”

Ben raises an eyebrow at her, and she realizes belatedly how he could have taken the information she has carelessly dropped. But he seems to consider their options, and finding none better, nods. “That is fine,” he says in that low voice of his.

He sounds like sin under silk sheets. He sounds like everything missing from the last year of her life.

_(I am anything but fine)_

His gaze is a knife between her shoulder blades as she leads him to a section of the diner that they keep closed in the winter. She is aware of his heat behind her, just a few steps behind.

“I drove.”

It takes her a few seconds to realize that he is merely answering her earlier question instead of preening. Driving the haul road is license to brag in any season, but surviving it in the winter makes legends out of leeches, builds them statues in the middle of their town squares, and sends them home with a Thanksgiving story that grows with the telling. His matter-of-fact response comes late and out of sync though. Ben Solo, always two steps behind.

She slides into a booth, and _one, two,_ he follows. “Not smart this time of year,” she snipes.

“How else was I going to get here?”

 _On your father’s plane,_ she wants to say, but that would be cruel of her, so she reaches for the clumsy but perfectly serviceable “What are you doing here anyway?” to make sense of the world. She hopes it doesn’t sound unkind.

“I could ask you the same question. You hate the snow—”

She shrugs. She has spent the last three years of her life away from the desert after all. “I’ve grown used to it.”

“—and you don’t know anyone here—”

“—I know Maz—"

“—and there’s no internet.”

“Ah, you’re getting the appeal.”

His jaw relaxes but his shoulders are still a touch too stiff. This is Ben after all. Hadn’t she spent the most of their relationship whittling his walls down with a spoon? Of course his guard is still up. “But Crait? Really?” he asks.

She doesn’t take it personally. “Careful, Ben. You sound like you’re judging.”

“It’s more than a truck stop but a little less than a town,” he growls. “Make of that what you will.”

“We can’t all be in fancy Coruscant now, can we?”

A beat. “I wouldn’t know.”

Huh. That isn’t what she is expecting. She had thought that Coruscant would be the first place he’d run to after their little fantasy life ran its natural course.

“What brings you to Crait? Business taking you to Gorse Bay?” Rey tries to keep her voice even. She has never imagined that she will be sitting across each other like this, trying to make conversation. Like they have just seen each other yesterday instead of fifteen months, like it is perfectly normal to chat with him as if he were one of her regulars.

“No,” he says. Another beat. “I wanted to ask you a question.”

Oh.

The haul road is rough and deliberate and dangerous. Whimsy has no place driving an SUV in the north. He could have texted. Emailed. There was no reason for him to drive two hundred fifty miles. She hadn’t deleted his number anyway, just she never could throw things away easily: toilet paper rolls, pretty packaging, affection. Rey was built for holding on.

Mostly.

“In person,” he clarifies, reading her thoughts as he always has. She watches his right hand grip the edge of the table, anchoring himself. “And I suppose, I wanted to see you again,” he adds softly.

Rey wants to brace against the table herself, but that would place her hand in proximity to his and she wasn’t ready for that. She takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders. There is no reason to drag this one out. “So. Ask.”

**Author's Note:**

> Tags and rating may change. Comments are always welcome!


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